My parents named me Zanni, for the clowns in commedia dell’arte. They didn’t want to name me Cyrano, or Jimmy Durante or even Pinocchio (fortunately). And they didn’t want me confused with Steve Martin’s movie, Roxanne. But they wanted to remind me that I was a clown, a misfit, a character to be joked at and even scorned…and not just because of my powers.

By now you may suspect why my name is Zanni or at least what led my beloved parents to saddle me with that moniker for life. I have a large nose, and the Zanni clowns from the theater of commedia dell’arte were known for their long noses (although in their cases, they wore masks onstage). In fact the longer their nose, the stupider the characters were, and my parents found that hilarious when I was born. They love to tell the story of how it took ten contractions for my nose to pop out and two for the rest of me. Great role models. Don’t be surprised when you see how that turned me into the wonderful person I am today.

But my nose is only one side of me. Granted, it’s a large side that invariably arouses jokes and zingers from those bold enough to speak openly. Everyone else just moves to the other side of the street where there’s more room.

Many authors struggle with how to deliver what their readers want to read. If we knew what they wanted we would write it. Right? After all, wouldn’t that be the way to a successful book? It would be like having the inside track on becoming a successful author.

But I don’t know that we always do that…I know I don’t. Sometimes we (I) write for ourselves with maybe some distant thought of keeping our readers in mind.

Oh crap, this isn’t right at all. I’ve struggled and come at it from all sorts of angles but I finally give up. It’s not the blank page or writer’s block…I haven’t found the right intro yet. The story needs to start somewhere else.

I know we each have our own style of creating book ideas, coming up with characters and settings, and some even do outlines…like me! But this second book in the Matt Kemp series doesn’t want to even get off the ground, and it’s all because of my outline.

I’ve read that many writers will actually use celebrity pictures to visualize their book characters. I had never done this before so I thought I would try it for my new Western, “A Witness To Murder.”

But first, let me explain something. This story would feature a young girl who would befriend the hardened U.S. Marshal, Matt Kemp. I wanted to explore what Kemp thought about kids and if he even liked them. Plus, the townspeople of Vail would not easily turn a child over to a murderer.